Project Info

Phylogeny of molluscs and their relatives based on new molecular data

The animal kingdom mainly can be subdivided into two major groups: Deuterostomes and Protostomes. Additionally, the latter ones can be split further into the Lophotrochozoa containing ca. 13 main Phyla and the Ecdysozoa consisting of ca. seven main Phyla. Within these two major groups however, a stable and well resolved resolution of any phylogentic relationship can hardly to be found. Thus, in collaboration with other scientists we are intending to create a stable and well resolved reconstruction of the Metazoa with special focus on the lophotrochozoan phylogeny by me and two other collaborates. My personal analyses will mainly focus on the Phylum Mollusca and their potential relatives the Sipunculida and the Entoprocta, respectively. To trace this, we will follow up two ways: (i) we will analyze a huge set of ESTs and obtain an intersection of "new" genes which can be used to trace the (deep) phylogeny of the Lophotrochozoa as well as Ecdysozoa and deuterostomes. The second way (ii) consists of ten "known" proteins common in all metazoan phyla, which will be analyzed additionally and used as a common data set to reconstruct the phylogeny of the metazoan classes at the deep Cambrian level as it is for the first approach.